I finally received it! I am typing this on my new powermac G4. Not that I have it, I can also give you the graphics card, it is an ATI Radeon 9000 Pro, better than the GeForce 4MX I thought I was going to get.
Hooking this thing up was a major pain. The tower was fine, but the keyboard wire is so short I had to switch the mac with my PC which was set up on the left because the usb ports on the mac are on the right. I got the mouse on Monday, so I tried it out on my PC and knew that would work.
So I started it up, and the fans blew really loud before settling down, It sounded almost like a radiator fan in your car when you pop the hood. Other than that, once it quiets down it is about as loud as my PC was, which is tolerable as long as I don't leave it on overnight while I am sleeping. This is much faster than my gateway, which struggles even under ubuntu 9.04, but comes very close to even with my Dell Dimension 4600. The Dell probably beats this g4 in terms of graphics with a 9600 PRO and RAM with 1.25GB, but performance in everything but graphics is the same, the G4 plays DVDs fine, and youtube is good as long as I don't try HQ or HD, so that's good too.
Here are the hardware specs to remind everyone before I post the startup times:
Apple Powermac G4 MDD - Model M8570
Dual 867MHz processors w/ 1MB L3 Cache per processor
ATI Radeon 9000 PRO
80Gig ATA Hard Drive
512MB RAM, 3 slots free
OS X Leopard 10.5.6 (I am in the process of updating it to 10.5.8 now)
AirPort Card installed
Superdrive installed (Pioneer DVD-RW is a superdrive, right?)
Apparently has USB 1.22
So here are the startup times:
Power on: 0s
Chime: 4s
Logo: 25s
Desktop Image: 55s
Finder: 56s
It is approximately twice as fast starting up as my windows computer is, and it is running Leopard, which if I remember correctly is the most taxing OS I can run on this mac, seeing as snow leopard is intel-only.
So far, the performance seems to be fine. I have no idea how much good the extra processor does in normal desktop performance, but this seems to do the job. The graphics card does well too, all of the animations are smooth, the dock gets a little jumpy if I turn on magnification, but I do not use that anyway so it's no big deal. Screensaver is completely smooth (tried Apple News and Flurry). AirPort works, currently has 2/5 signal strength from a router that is through 3 walls and across the house about 200 feet or so away (My PC router usually shows a 40-50% with 6-36Mbps range, but does sometimes lose the connection). So far there have been no connection issues as of the past hour. Apps installed include iTunes 8, Final Cut Pro 3, Garageband 2, help me out on this one and tell me what it is, but there is a program called toast titanium, and DVD Studio Pro, iMove, and iDVD among others. I currently have about 4 programs open (Firefox, Garageband 2, System Profiler, Updater which is installing updates) and there is very little lag if at all, except when I am doing all this and recording something in garageband.
So, what do you think? For a grand total of $137 ($130 for Tower and keyboard, $7 for Pro Mouse) is it a good deal? I like it so far, but then again I would like anything that is better than my old gateway is.